Olivia Pinnock

Asket, a menswear brand founded in 2015, grew an average of 150% every year in its first five years. It’s made gross merchandise sales of $10 million through direct-to-consumer channels and broken even on the business. Its strategy now is to slow down growth.
It’s typical for young businesses to have high levels of growth in the first few years and then plateau, but rather than an unfortunate inevitability, this is a conscious decision by Asket to cap growth

In the midst of Milan Fashion Week, the most inspiring street style was not to be found outside the shows of the hottest Italian designers but gathering outside the world's parliamentary buildings.

Metaverse Fashion Week, hosted by virtual social platform Decentraland, promised to be the largest digital fashion event to date, but cartoonish graphics and technical glitches made it an unglamorous experience for some fashion devotees.

Driven by the awareness of a growing number of consumers, the fashion industry is trying, with varying degrees of sincerity, to be more virtuous and more sustainable. But in spite of initiatives to improve recycling, promote exchanges, and the range of rental options on offer, progress to make this highly polluting sector go green remains modest.

Retailers are being urged to support their Indian suppliers as a devastating second wave of Covid has caused factories to close and threatens workers' well-being.

Boohoo Group’s new remuneration policy is the latest "green" financing initiative to offer incentives for fashion’s environmental and social performance.

According to consulting firm McKinsey, the number of garments bought per person rose 60% between 2000 and 2014.

While fashion brands have a responsibility to make their clothes more sustainable and less throwaway, there’s undoubtedly a role shoppers can play by consuming less. It doesn’t matter how many organic t-shirts we buy; we won’t fix fashion’s footprint if we still consume at the same rate.

In fashion, few names carry such high esteem as Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel. The creator of the little black dress and the No.5 perfume that Marilyn Monroe wore to bed has had a huge influence from high end to high street and has been quoted into cliché with soundbites such as “a girl should two things: classy and fabulous.”

“Have I made you excited about sweat?” says material researcher, Alice Potts. She has.

In 2018, Potts’ graduate collection from London’s Royal College of Art gained widespread media attention and praise from industry insiders including the British Fashion Council’s ambassador for emerging talent, Sarah Mower, for its incredible athleticwear covered in crystals grown from sweat.

Despite the challenges of coronavirus to the fashion industry, attention on sustainability has remained high in recent months. Some of the biggest industry news of the pandemic has been brands addressing the unrelenting and wasteful fashion cycle and unfair treatment of supply chain workers.

Fashion brands and retailers are starting to realise the value of the “green dividend” – and coronavirus is forcing businesses to build sustainability into their resilience plans for the future.

In February, VF Corporation, owner of brands including Vans, Timberland and The North Face, became the first clothing and footwear company to launch a “green bond”, raising €500m (£466m) from what it said was “a diverse group of investors from around the world”.

Primark has announced the expansion of its Sustainable Cotton Programme to 160,000 farmers across India, Pakistan and China who will be trained in more ecologically friendly practices by the end of 2022.

Consumers will likely be pleased to be seeing more “Primark cares” labels on their clothing but its promise of “sustainable cotton” is vague.

In the heart of Siberia, the Sakha Republic is home to acres of evergreen larch trees, herds of reindeer, the indigenous Yakut people and, under its permafrost, diamonds.

Mining is one of the main industries in the region, with 95pc of Russia’s diamonds originating here, accounting for 27pc of the world’s supply.

Dolce & Gabbana’s most recent scandal, caused by a culturally-insensitive advertising campaign, has harmed its business in China. Drapers investigates whether the damage can be reversed and what lessons can be learned.

Clothing rental has the potential to make fashion retail more sustainable and provide benefits to both consumers and brands.